


Cold as the Clay

by AnnabellaOcean



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-07 11:19:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4261386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnabellaOcean/pseuds/AnnabellaOcean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His voice this time is slow, condescending, the voice of a daycare teacher at the end of a trying day. "Rose, I have committed a murder and I need you to help keep me out of jail."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old one I had lying around. Basically, at the time I wrote it, I was _very_ inspired by Roachpatrol's [Rise and Shine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/305539) (which you should definitely read if you haven't already!), so be warned of the similarities.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"Every step of the way, we walk the line_  
>  _Your days are numbered – so are mine."_  
>  \- Bob Dylan, _Mississippi_

The Lalonde household always was what one might charitably call "problematic." Consider the fact that her morbidly alcoholic mother was what Rose would without hesitation label the better of her parents, and you might get the idea.

Poor Mother, Rose thinks. Roxy Lalonde is clean now, has been since the drink damn near killed her, but the brain damage makes her slur even when she's sober and she can't hold a pencil _(or the neck of a bottle)_ anymore for the shaking of her fingers.

Roxy currently lives in a condo in Florida that Dave arranged for her, with a no doubt exorbitantly expensive nurse who visits once a day to keep tabs on her and make sure she hasn't tripped over her feet in the kitchen and cracked her skull on the refrigerator, or – worse! – procured a bottle of Jack Daniels and started furtively chugging it in the bathroom.

Rose hasn't visited her in almost a year.

Still, she would categorically claim that her mother, her poor, vulgar, drunken, neglectful mother, was the better of her two parents. Because her father –

But she doesn't like to think about that, _(little lady)_ so she pushes the memory of him away.

The Lalonde household was deeply problematic, yes, but with their father dead and their mother just another aging victim to alcoholism, it can't really be said to exist anymore. Not really. In the mind, though... that's a whole other story.

Rose recognizes herself as deeply, basically broken. That's what being a Lalonde has done to her. Her brother Dave is no different, truly, not fundamentally, but the ways they've dealt with their defects are as disparate as the colors of their eyes.

That's why her brother never takes anything seriously. That's why his voice is a disaffected monotone, why he approaches everything in his life with a sense of sardonic detachment. That's why he always wears shades, and even when he takes them off his red eyes are so guarded he might as well have been wearing another pair underneath.

But he is her brother, and she loves him unreservedly. They are a team, and because they managed to survive the Lalonde household together, Rose knows they're the winning one.

*

It's the unfortunate truth that Rose isn't very musical. She'd like to believe she is, because she always strives for perfection in all her endeavors, and anything less than perfection leaves her frustrated. But she's also far too smart, too self-aware, to pretend that her half-hearted fiddling on the violin is anything beyond passable.

She doesn't have the knack, so she long ago took to practicing loudly, grimly, defiantly, daring anyone who might be listening to call her aptitude into question.

It's become a sort of weird catharsis, the frustration, which she's begun to crave more than the actual playing. She plays when she's upset or angry about something. The mundane irritation helps take her mind off things, so she practices, muttering curses under her breath as her fingers don't quite manage to obey her orders and the bow squeaks sadly against the strings.

It takes her mind off things, and if it makes her brow knit and her pulse rise a little, that's alright. It's anger she can handle. It's safe.

But she doesn't think about that, hardly acknowledges it. Rose is a young woman who has perfected the art of lying to others a long time ago, and somewhere along the line, she began lying to herself with such expertise that she managed to slip the fact entirely past her own radar.

*

It's four in the morning on the east coast when Rose's phone wakes her. She's not a still sleeper, and the covers are twisted around her ankles, constricting. She's not a heavy sleeper, either, and is instantly alert – and she knows who's calling without even having looked.

She does a quick calculation as she grabs the phone – even accounting for timezones, it should be after midnight from where he's calling. She picks up the call, head falling back against the pillow. "Yes?"

"I fucked up, Rose. Help me out."

Despite his words, his voice isn't all that urgent. But she's known Dave Lalonde all her life and there is a tremor there and the words come a little too fast. She doesn't exactly know if he has the emotional capacity to be panicked, but she would at least describe his current emotional state as "agitated."

He's never been one for pleasantries, at least not with her. Nor has he been blessed with relatively untroubled sleep, like she has (except the intermittent nightmares, where a voice calls her _little lady_ – but she banishes the thought at once). She's used to taking his calls at this hour. "What's the problem, Dave?"

"I killed her."

"Her" can mean no-one other than Jade Harley, a buck-toothed girl of such utter _normality_ that her and Dave's relationship is a thing of mystery to Rose. She stares up into her shadowed ceiling and plays along with his tasteless prank call. "That's great – put her in the freezer. It's going to save you grocery money for at least two weeks."

"Yeah, Rose, laugh it up. I'm not joking. This is an actual bona fide emergency and I need your sage advice. I killed her, what do I do?"

Because of the nature of her and her brother's relationship, Rose ignores the unease gnawing at her stomach now, and remains coolly wry. "You're taking up valuable beauty sleep time here, Dave."

His voice this time is slow, condescending, the voice of a daycare teacher at the end of a trying day. "Rose, I have committed murder and I need you to help keep me out of jail."

Rose sits up and swings her legs off the side of the bed, looking at her bare feet, gray in the gloom. "You're serious, aren't you?" She doesn't wait for a response. She doesn't need one. She asks: "Do you have any plastic bags?"

Most other people would start off by asking "What happened?" In fact, most other people would likely start off by succumbing to blind panic. Not Rose – she's long ago traded her panic for white-knuckled control, so she looks at her feet without really seeing them and guides the monosyllabic voice of her brother dear as he cleans up the scene of his crime.

*

She doesn't sleep afterwards. She doesn't even try. It seems pointless.

Now she growls, a harsh sound in her throat, glaring at her fingers as if that might make them behave, and sets the bow to the strings again – (it judders a little against them, not quite the smooth, perfectly-controlled movement she's seen from professional violin players on YouTube) – and starts from the beginning of the piece with steely determination.

Soon enough, there is a loud thump on the other side of the wall, which she ignores, and a stomp from above, too, which she ignores. She even ignores the impatient banging at her door as her neighbors are driven to more desperate measures. She plays and plays. Her neighbors eventually give up and try to sleep anyway.

The sun comes up.

*

She is an amateur psychologist, and she's good at it too. Maybe because, as her brother once put it, tapping at his temple, "we got so much psychology in here it ain't even funny." Whatever the underlying reason for her skill, the skill itself is undeniable, and she's spent a lot of time thinking about Dave Lalonde and Jade Harley.

Most likely Jade didn't suspect the degree of damage in Dave. Rose only met her twice, but they wouldn't even have needed to talk for Rose to know that Jade was the type of girl who thought she could _save_ people. That if only she was around long enough, listened patiently enough and said the right words, perhaps one day Dave's smile would reach his eyes.

They were introduced by a mutual friend, apparently. That was some months back – just shy of a year ago, in fact – and they've been in a steady relationship since then.

Well, up until tonight, evidently. There is a sick twist in Rose's stomach as she thinks that, and she looks down into the small bowl of cereal she's poured and realizes she's not going to eat today.

As for Dave – what did he want with the relationship? Maybe it was that Jade was so very, very normal. A normal girl from normal circumstances. Maybe she made him feel safe, but if that was the case, why would he...?

It's strange, too, because she's never known Dave to show any romantic interest in anyone, really. Well, except for _(little man little lady)_ but she's _definitely_ not going _there_ so she stands up suddenly and pours the bowl out in the sink.

*

She goes about her day dully, a non-stop static of fear in the back of her mind. Fear that her brother is going to be found out and put in jail, or worse; that he's going to be demonized and seen as a monster. He's not a monster, she knows, he's just... difficult. He's had a difficult life. Rose doesn't want people thinking he's a bad person – she loves him too much for that.

But she assuages her fear with rationality. Dave and Jade were still living apart, and he said nobody knew she was at his place that night. And Rose walked him through the clean-up patiently, putting her sharp mind to using every trick she knows, every trick she's learned from TV and from late-night stints on unwholesome internet message boards. They fixed things.

She keeps her fear in check.

She keeps in control.

*

A week passes before the phone rings again.

She rolls over in bed and kicks the tangled covers away, and answers. She hasn't spoken to Dave since that night, and honestly doesn't want to now for fear of what he might have to say, but her voice is steady. "Hello, Dave."

"Did I wake you up." It's weirdly flat, not really a question. She answers it as if it were, anyway.

"It's alright. I'm a light sleeper anyway."

"Yeah well at least you fucking get to sleep. Count yourself lucky." There is something else in his voice, something she wouldn't have noticed if she didn't know him so well. The merest suggestion of a slur. Though he hides it well, Dave is drunk; he doesn't drink often, but when he does it always makes her uneasy because it makes her think _(Rosie hun I'm not in the ffffuckin' mood)_ of her mother.

"What do you want, Dave?" It's not a challenging question. Anyone who knows her (or thinks they do) would be amazed at how softly she can speak when she gets these early-morning calls. They wouldn't have thought her capable of it.

The connection hums mutely in her ear for a few night-dark seconds as Dave doesn't respond. Then he does. "I'm scared I might do it again."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"I am as ugly as I seem_  
>  _Worse than all your dreams_  
>  _Could ever make me out to be."_  
>  \- The White Stripes, _As Ugly As I seem_

Rose doesn't have any friends. She has acquaintances, but anything beyond that she instantly shuts down; she scares people away with her hard eyes, her impenetrable, brittle self-control. But she has her brother, and when he calls her from halfway across the continent in the small hours of the morning and tells her that he needs her, she doesn't waste any time.

Within twelve hours of his call, she's knocking on his door.

Nothing happens the first time, so she knocks again, harder. This time there's a sound from within, and after a minute Dave opens the door. Though Rose doesn't move, her brother looks so much like their father in that moment that she has to fight down an impulse to shrink away. But he doesn't call her _little lady._ It's Dave, and he turns his back on her and walks into the house and she follows.

Of the two of them, he is the business-minded one. He's built a career of internet content creation, styling himself "Dave Strider" (which Rose doesn't know if it's an ironic Tolkien reference or what) as his online persona. He writes opaquely satirical articles and composes his "ill jams," his innate sense of freelance savvy guiding him from one relatively lucrative deal to the next. That's why he doesn't live in a dingy apartment like her, but a friendly suburban house.

She follows him to the living room, where he slumps down into the couch with artful nonchalance. She remains standing. It feels odd, almost unreal, to see him again: he looks the same as ever, but she knows he isn't. He's a murderer. He's a murderer, and he's her big brother, and she would die to protect him if that's what it takes.

"Thanks for coming," he says at length.

She nods. "As usual, the task of looking after you falls on my shoulders."

There's his crooked grin. He pats the couch next to him, and she sits down, and he says: "Man, there might be a lot of fucked-up things in my life but your caretaking abilities do not fall under that category."

That makes her happy, and it makes her even happier when her poor broken murderer brother continues: "I'm glad you came." She says she knows and puts a hand on his knee, and wishes they could hug.

*

Vriska Serket is tall, all angles, and stands with her arms crossed in the doorway. Rose feels like she is being scrutinized. That's alright. It's nothing she can't handle. Her face is carefully unreadable, as always, and her cool violet eyes meet Vriska's evaluating gaze head-on.

Rose knew even as she got on the plane that this was going to be a long-term stay. She'd hoped she would be able to stay with Dave, but as soon as she broached the subject she was shot down. He was implacable. She spoke with him the only way she knows how, in their private, familiar Lalonde banter, but he wouldn't budge.

In the end, she borrowed his wi-fi and checked Craigslist for places up for rent nearby.

Vriska lives in a distinctly mass-produced apartment complex closer to the city center relative to Dave's house, and has a free room she is willing to sublet for appropriate compensation. Her name is at the bottom of Rose's short list, a last resort, and Rose is privately apprehensive that this deal is going to fall through as well, because they dislike each other at first sight.

"Do I know you?" Vriska asks, evaluation apparently at an end, and leans against the doorframe.

"I don't believe so." Rose wonders privately if it's a demonstrative gesture, if the wild-haired woman is knowingly barring her way into the apartment.

"Hmm. You want to rent my room, huh?"

"Believe it or not, that's the reason why I contacted you about your ad."

Vriska raises an eyebrow as if unimpressed with her reply. "Can you pay?"

"Yes." She can't, truly, her funds are almost exhausted just from paying for the plane ticket, but Dave has money and he's promised to cover for her until she can find a job.

"And that thing?" Now her prospective roommate is eyeing the violin case she's slung across her shoulder. "Am I going to have to listen to your boring classical music all day?"

Rose straightens her back. "In a worst-case scenario, yes. Preferably you'd either develop the mental faculties required to appreciate it or poke your eardrums with something long and sharp until it doesn't bother you anymore."

One side of Vriska's lip curls up to reveal her teeth, but her pearly canine for some reason makes Rose's mind want to say "reveal her _fangs_ " instead. She has an eyepatch over her left eye and her left hand is too still, too smooth. Prosthetic. Rose doesn't ask what happened; she doesn't care.

"Very funny. _Preferably_ I'd probably save whatever long and sharp thing I could find for you. Luckily, I have the option of just doing this." And Vriska goes to close the door.

Rose steps forward and slips her shoe in the crack, but her back is still stiff with damnable pride and she doesn't apologize, she doesn't grovel. Instead she says: "I'd be willing to pay extra."

"Would you be willing to not play the violin?"

"No."

"Then get your foot the fuck out of my door."

"I need this apartment. I need to be close to my brother, but I can't live _with_ him..."

Vriska pulls painfully on the door and, voice harsh, tells her to go _fuck_ her brother. That makes Rose's jaw set and she pulls the door open with uncanny strength with one hand and grabs Vriska by the hair with the other and _pulls_. The girl tumbles against the corridor wall with a caw of protest, then looks up at Rose from her undignified position, eyes wide with rage.

"Don't say that again, or I'll make you symmetrical," Rose says, slowly, with the studied calm of the truly furious. Vriska stares for long, frozen seconds...

And then, absurdly, begins to laugh.

She reaches up with her remaining hand, and Rose looks at it for a moment before grasping it and helping her up, as if they were old friends instead of new enemies. Vriska pats her too hard on the shoulder, still shaking with raucous laughter.

"I can already tell you're the most insufferable person I've ever met," she says when she's calmed down enough to speak, sticking a finger behind her glasses to wipe away the tears in her good eye. She grins widely, predatorily. "But fuck me if it wouldn't be _interesting_ to have you as a roommate. When are you moving in?"

Rose unshoulders her violin case. "Right now."

*

She practices ardently that evening, not as an escape but because it gives her grim satisfaction to hear Vriska thumping on the wall and shouting at her to _keep the fucking racket down._ She continues until the girl comes crashing in through the door, gesticulating wildly and shouting, "I thought you were at least going to be good at this!"

That makes Rose stop and fix her with a cold stare. After a couple of seconds she holds the violin and the bow out, and Vriska takes the things with one irritated eyebrow raised.

"Why don't you do it better yourself?"

Rose knows already that her new roommate is a girl who can't turn down a challenge. Vriska sets her jaw and shoots her a defiant glare before turning her attention to the violin. She nestles it inexpertly underneath her pointed chin, sets the bow to the strings, and makes an unholy racket.

Rose snatches the instrument back and holds her hand out for the bow. "That sounded like a cat meeting a truly gruesome end."

"Nuh nuh muh-nuh muh nuh," Vriska mumbles in mocking parody of her words, handing the bow back and slinking out of the room without a further word.

That feels like a triumph, but Rose keeps practicing as loudly as before and there are no more thumps on the wall that night, and she's more disappointed by that than she would have expected.

*

The next day, she shows up at Dave's house and there is someone else there with him.

She's never met him before, but she's seen pictures of him on her brother's Facebook feed. (She has a Facebook account for the specific purpose of being able to check Dave's feed, in fact.) He's short, with wide, wide eyebrows that make her think of twin leeches – but then again, her mind runs in strange directions.

Dave introduces them. "Karkat, this is my little sis, Rose. Rose, this is Karkat. He's a completely reprehensible little fuck."

"Hey, fuck you," Karkat says. He has bags under his eyes, but apart from that and his eyebrows, he's not entirely unattractive. He doesn't smile when he shakes Rose's hand. "You're his sister, huh? I'm so sorry – that must be a truly fucking execrable life to live. It's bad enough attempting to be his friend."

Rose glances over at Dave's impassive shades, and in response to her unspoken question he nearly imperceptibly inclines his head. This is the mutual friend, the one that introduced him to Jade. Rose can see, now that she looks closer, in the bags and the faint redness in the corners of his eyes, that Karkat's been doing a lot of crying recently.

He leaves soon afterwards, and Rose wonders if he's being belligerent and vulgar to cover up his sorrow.

"I waited a couple of days before calling him. Asked him if he'd seen her. Called the cops." Dave says this in response to a question she hasn't even asked yet, speaking as soon as the front door whispers shut after Karkat.

Rose regards him coolly. "You called the police?"

"What would you suggest? Of course I called the police. My girlfriend of a year is MIA and nobody knows where she is."

She sits down on the couch, sighing. "Yes, that is generally what the abbreviation means."

"But, look," Dave says, walking over and standing next to her, "I did everything the way you said. Washed up like you said and dumped her across town. Burned the carpet. I even bought one of those ultraviolet lamps to check if I missed any spots."

She knows. She knows she put her mind to fixing this, and she knows how thorough her brother can be when he wants to. The problem is that she's scared it won't be enough.

She doesn't ask why he did it. She doesn't ask how. Her knowledge of the incident is limited to his description of the amount of blood on the floor, which was "a fuckin' mess." She knows misfortune follows the two of them like a predator tracking its wounded prey, so she doesn't blame him for what he did. She only wants to protect him.

"And what about the other thing?" she asks. "The thing you called me about yesterday morning?"

He expels air through his nose – not quite a sigh – and walks past her so he can sit down next to her on the couch. He is wearing ripped jeans, and his exposed knees are very pale. "Jesus, Rose, I don't know. I was drunk."

But she suspects that's not all of it, so she waits for him to continue.

"It just... I felt like shit after I did it. Puked for a good hour before I called you. But now I feel like I'm gonna want to do it again. Like it's an itch I can feel coming on again, like it's an insect bite. You know? Or like I want a smoke."

The likeness is meant for her, because she's the one who began smoking when she was fifteen and kicked the habit when she was sixteen, because it was spiralling out of her control, because Rose doesn't like things that are beyond her control. She understands what he means. "And why do you believe I can help you with that?"

He grins, and knuckles her on the shoulder. "You're my better half, right?"


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"If these bare walls could speak_  
>  _They would sing out a funeral song."_  
>  \- Laura Gibson, _Funeral Song_

Dave gives her a ride back to her apartment. During the drive Rose's thoughts turn to Dirk – the eldest child of the Lalonde household, the first-born and wayward son. He left so early in her life that all she can remember is two piercing orange eyes and a mouth that never smiled.

None of the remaining members of the family have any contact with him. He estranged himself willingly; he got the fuck outta Dodge, as Dave has put it in the past. Maybe because he saw how broken it all was, because he saw how much better his prospects for survival would be if he were on his own.

Rose thinks that, out of the three of them, he's the smart one.

*

She hardly has time to come through the door before Vriska is accosting her, wide-eyed and incredulous.

"Your brother is _Dave Strider?_ " she exclaims, holding her laptop up. She's got her Facebook feed up, and Rose sees herself and Dave, his one arm slung about her shoulders, the other holding his phone at arm's length. She's giving the camera a defiant stare and he's wearing his trademark blank expression, and there's a definite family resemblance. He insisted on taking the no-doubt ironic photo before he drove her back to the apartment – the caption says "chillin at my crib w/ my sis."

"Yes," Rose says, surprised that Vriska would know who he is, much less care. "Do you know him?"

" _Know_ him? Are you kidding, Lalonde? He's the coolest fucking guy in town!" Vriska waxes loquacious about his DJ gigs, his raw impromptu raps, his chilly "badassness." It's like someone's flipped a switch, Rose muses. Suddenly all the vitriol from yesterday has been replaced with – well, what, exactly? Admiration by association? Rose thinks she has a pretty good idea where Vriska is going with this, and Vriska confirms the suspicion.

"Do you think you could introduce us?"

"No," Rose says flatly, striding towards her room.

"Come ooon!" Vriska wheedles petulantly. "I mean I've talked to him when he's been out doing gigs, but I don't think he's ever taken a girl home..."

She stops herself, as if suddenly realizing that it's Rose's brother she's talking about, but all Rose can think is _that's right, that's right, he's never had any interest in women except_ and then a great rushing black wave of fear overtakes her as she remembers a voice saying "Little man, little lady, don't you know that's _weird?_ " and for a second she knows why she and her brother can't hug, haven't hugged since... But the memory is gone, blocked out.

She stands in the hallway for a long moment, stock-still, composing herself. She realizes Vriska is staring at her, and meets her gaze unflinchingly. "No," she says again, and goes to her room.

*

As the days pass, she realizes something about Vriska. The girl is loud, boisterous, vulgar and not very eloquent, but she is not, as Rose initially believed, stupid. In fact, Rose begins to almost enjoy their everyday clashes.

After the revelation that Dave is her brother, Vriska becomes considerably less overtly hostile. Still, they often and vehemently argue over the most inconsequential things, Vriska becoming more and more agitated with every insult traded and Rose going the other way, turning frosty and haughty.

She realizes another thing: after such times, when one of them storms off in frustration or finally gets the last word, her wild-haired roommate has the remarkable ability to calm down in record time. Often Rose will go to her room after one of their confrontations to angrily busy herself at her computer or practice her violin, and within a few minutes Vriska will show up, wearing that inimitable shit-eating grin, and insult her in a good-natured fashion that is almost conciliatory.

*

A week has passed since Rose knocked on Dave's door that first day, and she goes to visit him again. Vriska – who seemingly does not work and is ever-present in the small apartment – offers to come along, but Rose tells her no. She has better things to do than watch while her roommate tries to get in Dave's pants.

She takes the bus. When she's walking up the driveway to Dave's unassuming house, a palpable sense of apprehension comes over her, settles in her gut like a weight. She opens the door without knocking, and calls out her brother's name.

The house is oddly dim, and she realizes all the curtains have been pulled. In response to her call, instead of Dave's voice, she hears muffled shouting. It sounds like a woman.

Rose closes the door behind her. The whimpering continues. She steels herself and walks into the living room, in long strides so she doesn't have time to hesitate.

This is the scene that greets her: facing away from her, tied up inexpertly in one of Dave's kitchen chairs, is a woman with reddish-brown hair. She's wearing a teal t-shirt and her arms are liberally dotted with freckles. Standing in front of her is Dave, inscrutable as always behind those absurd shades, and he's holding a knife, and the knife is red with blood.

Now that she sees it, Rose can smell the blood in the room, too – a cloying iron tang. She freezes in the doorway, and the woman in the chair turns as if to look at her, but she can't, because her eyes are a ruin, all pulped in their orbits and weeping both blood and clear humors, and the way the fluids mingle makes Rose's stomach turn.

The woman's whimpering rises in intensity again, becomes a dull shout, then a scream. She has a washcloth stuffed in her mouth, Rose sees. Now Dave speaks, too, over the woman's vocalizations, and if she wasn't acquainted with his apathetic mental state, Rose would say there was a note of genuine distress in his voice. "Fuck, Rose, she just, she recognized me at the store and I don't fuckin' know, I invited her here, it just..."

Dully, Rose treks over to the couch and sits down. From there she has a perfect view of the bloody mess that is the woman's face; she averts her eyes. When she says nothing, Dave continues talking, running a hair through his hair and she can see he's getting blood in it, a vivid red against the pale blonde. He says: "But now you're here, you can stop me..."

The rage – at him, because she knows her brother isn't a fool, but he's acting like one – that rises up in her makes her throat feel thick, but when she speaks her words are slow and clear, every word enunciated. "Stop you? Look what you've done. Do you suggest we let her go?"

He looks when she tells him to, absurdly obedient, shoulders slumping. "Man, fuck."

She gets up off the couch again, walks over to him, puts a hand on his shoulder. The familiar gesture feels out of place in this situation, and she considers again how very strange, how very strange this is. For a moment the fear threatens to overwhelm her – fear of what might happen to him, to the both of them, and maybe, just maybe a tinge of fear of him – but she keeps it in check.

"Dave. If you must do this – if you must – then you have to be _smart_ about it. Please. You're going to get caught if you aren't."

He looks at her for a long time, and when he speaks Rose can hear in his voice that he knows what a huge thing it is he's asking of her. "You're the smart one, babe. You've always been. Will you help me?"

She needs no time to think about it before she responds. "I'll help you cover your tracks and clean up after yourself. I can't help you... do it. I can't."

Dave nods thoughtfully, and regards the struggling woman in the chair, whose sobs are muffled by the washcloth. He turns back to Rose. "Do you want to leave?"

She sets her jaw and turns her gaze to his helpless victim, for the first time since that terrible first glimpse. She forces herself to look until she can take in every detail, every gruesome detail without feeling like she's about to black out. "No," she mumbles, still looking. "I'm in this as much as you are, now."

"Yeah," Dave says wryly, and hefts the knife. "We're fucking entrenched in this bitch."

*

She makes him put a sheet of plastic under the chair before he continues; then watches, unflinching, as he works. What surprises her, as the woman's struggling and vocalizations become first much more frantic, and then more and more sluggish as the blood loss begins affecting her in earnest, is that it's not the blood and the gruesomeness which gets to her. It's the _violence_ apparent in Dave's every graceless cut, which reminds her of their father. And it's the fact that he _(no no no)_ but there's no stopping the thought, he almost seems to be moving like a puppet.

Afterwards, he turns to her, breathing heavily. "I'm done," he says.

The activity that follows feels almost good in comparison to the watching. She takes the knife from him (it's just a thing, after all, even if it is slick with blood) and cuts the dead woman's bonds. She tells him to fetch a trash bag, and throws the tatters of rope away. She pulls the chair away, wraps the corpse in the plastic sheet and tells Dave to give her a hand. Together they carry the dead woman through the house and put her in the bathtub.

She wipes the chair with a wet towel and puts it back with the others in the kitchen. Dave's house has a small fireplace, where he burned the carpet after Jade, and she tells him to burn the chair as soon as he can. But first he has to take his car, drive into town and buy a large quantity of lye. He looks at her for a few seconds, but does not ask why.

When he's left, she goes over the living room floor. He's shown her the ultraviolet lamp she instructed him to buy, and she uses it to make sure the floor is completely spotless. When she's done, she sits in the couch, alone with her thoughts again.

A puppet, yes. That's the best way she can describe it. Like there were unseen strings, pulling at his joints. She's seen movement like that before. Of course she has.

Speaking of movement, something in the corner of her eye makes her look down: her hands are shaking. She leaps up from the couch abruptly, desperate for something to occupy her. She can't think about this anymore.

Her feet take her through the house, into the bathroom, where Dave's second victim rests dishevelled in the tub in an absurd parody of lying in state. Rose leans down and flicks the plastic sheet aside, searching the woman's pockets until she finds a wallet.

*

Dave comes back with two heavy-looking plastic bags in his hands. She meets him in the doorway and takes one, and leads the way into the bathroom. She's removed the bloodstained plastic sheeting and put it in the trash bag with the rope ends, and used the knife to cut the clothes off the dead girl. She's stuffed them in a second bag. In a smaller bag on the sink are the girl's keys, and her phone, which Rose has broken in half. The wallet is in her pocket.

She grabs a towel and wraps it over her nose and mouth, and gets down to business.

It's an old trick for getting rid of roadkill, which Rose has learned during research conducted since moving here: mixing lye and water makes a base, which dissolves the flesh of such unlucky animals. By extension, Rose figures, it should work with murder victims.

It's not pleasant work.

Afterwards, Dave flushes the sludgy brown mess down the drain with the showerhead, while she sits on the toilet, watching his face. He doesn't move a muscle, and seems completely absorbed in his unsavory task; after a few minutes with no sound but the rushing of the water, she shifts, digs the wallet out of her pocket, speaks.

"Her name was Terezi Pyrope."

Dave turns his head to look at her, betraying no emotion. He looks, for all the world, like he doesn't understand what she's talking about and is waiting for her to clarify. In fact, she's not entirely sure why she brought it up herself. The conversation trails off after that.

*

It's not until after Dave's done, when all the brown ooze has been disposed off down the bathtub's drain and all that remains of Terezi Pyrope is a slightly off-kilter skeleton, that Rose suddenly feels her stomach rising up in her throat. She leans over the edge of the tub and retches, her breakfast coming up and splattering over Terezi's bones as a final indignity.

Dave doesn't comment at first, just turns the water on again and washes her spew away. Then he says: "Feels shitty, doesn't it?"

She nods, and turns to the sink, drinking directly from the faucet to get the sour taste out of her mouth. When she straightens up, she sees that Dave is looking at her in the mirror, and for some reason he's smiling. He says:

"You held out longer than I did last time. You always were the stronger one."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"Be it ill or be it good?_  
>  _Oh my sweet babe_  
>  _I am doing as I should."_  
>  \- Anais Mitchell, _Dyin Day_

When Rose wakes up, Vriska is standing over her, shaking her by the shoulders and looking more than a little alarmed. Rose thrashes a little but a voice in her head tells her to _stop lie still GET IT UNDER CONTROL,_ and she does, though her chest still rises and falls at jackrabbit speed.

The vivid imagery of the nightmare is already fading, but she remembers the sight of the corpse at the plank floor of the barn _(limbs tangled like a discarded puppet)_ well enough to know exactly what memory it is that she's relived.

"Hey, fuck, are you alright?" Vriska asks with something approaching real concern, and although Rose can't see her she can hear that Vriska isn't grinning, now. In the next moment, Rose realizes that the reason she can't see properly is because her eyes are swimming with tears, and she claps her hands over her face and says, "Leave."

But Vriska just kneels down on the floor next to her bed and replies, "No way. You were _screaming_ in your sleep, Lalonde. I figure it's either help you or we both get evicted."

And still there's nothing in her voice even hinting at her usual mocking tone, but Rose just repeats that single word. "Leave."

After another moment during which she remains unmoving, Vriska stands up. She says, "Fine," in a voice which is – disappointed? exasperated? what? – and leaves, and Rose stifles her sobs until it's time to get up.

*

When she comes to the breakfast table, Vriska is sitting there, one hand slung over the back of one of the frankly puritanical kitchen chairs, looking for all the world like it's the most comfortable seat she's ever sat in. (That's another of Vriska's strange traits – seemingly being able to make herself at home anywhere, anytime.) She's looking at her laptop.

Rose is fully prepared for a return to the status quo, but Vriska only peers at her with her one good eye and says, "Hey."

Daring her to mention the events of that night, Rose holds her gaze for a second, then says, "Good morning."

But what Vriska does instead manages to make Rose wish she'd just said something about the nightmare. What she does is hold the laptop up and display a smiling face-shot of Jade Harley. She says: "Check this out. They found some girl in a dumpster."

*

It's a testament to her practiced self-control that Rose manages to sit still on the bus, but despite that she can't stop her worried fingers from playing with the clasp of her purse, and she realizes with a start that she still has Terezi Pyrope's wallet in there. She curses herself silently – she meant to dispose of it last night, slip it into some random trash can under cover of darkness, but she must have been more distraught than she thought.

She tries to think, tries to remember what she thought about murder before, what her moral standpoint was. As it stands, now, she realizes with something akin to wonder that she can't actually feel any guilt. She watched Terezi Pyrope die and did nothing, in fact encouraged her murderer and told him to do it. Terezi Pyrope was a person, a woman with a life, who just happened to flirt with the wrong guy while shopping – but it's just Rose's head saying that. Her conscience is AWOL.

Instead, she finds herself picturing the scene again. It wasn't a crime of passion. Dave tied Terezi up, like he wanted to savor it. Up until now, without realizing it, Rose has pictured Jade's murder as a complete opposite – an argument, tempers flaring, a mutual struggle and an accidental death.

Now she realizes, with a sick twinge in her stomach, that her brother is travelling down a dark, dark path, and before she can stop herself she flashes on the night in the hayloft, and the flickering flashlight below and a voice calling her "little lady."

She's spent her life since then trying to force those memories away, to pretend she's forgotten. But what's happening now is making them all come back.

She steps off the bus.

*

Once again, Karkat is at Dave's house. This time, he and Dave are sitting on the couch, and he's buried his face in his hands and doesn't look up when she enters.

She wants him to leave, she wants to be alone with Dave so they can discuss what now – but as she looks at him there, arm slung around Karkat's shaking shoulders even as his face turns attentively to her, she realizes with sudden clarity that there's nothing left for them to talk about. What can they say? Jade has been found, and it's now only a matter of time before Dave is caught and put away. Maybe they'll link Terezi to him as well, further on down the line, in which case she'll be an accessory.

It's over. The conviction is so strong that it almost knocks her off-balance, and she leans against the doorjamb, the very brother she's tried and failed to protect watching her impassively.

She leaves again without a word.

*

When she comes back, Vriska meets her in the doorway, like the day she realized Dave was Rose's brother. Now, though, her face is – somehow off, like it's been broken and put together almost right but not quite, and Rose realizes when Vriska speaks that it's because she is dealing with emotions that don't come naturally to her. Sympathy. Horror.

"I... remembered her name from somewhere else," and the voice is low, almost unfamiliar. "Jade Harley, right? And... then I remembered. She was your brother's girlfriend."

Rose looks at her, expressionless, not because she's hiding what she feels this time but because she's entirely unsure of how she _should_ feel.

Vriska continues, falteringly. "And, I... just... you know, if you need anything..."

There's an entirely uncomfortable silence, and Rose deals with it by toeing off her shoes and retreating to her room. She breathes an unsteady sigh and plays her violin as loud as she can and glares at the wall but the thump of Vriska's fist never comes. After only a few minutes Rose can take no more. She tosses the violin on the bed in an uncharacteristically untidy fashion and marches out again, and now knocks on her roommate's door.

The door opens on Vriska, still wearing that expression of deep sympathy. It's unfamiliar, but Rose also sees that it is remarkably genuine – perhaps more genuine than the usual fare of toothy grins and mocking eyes.

Vriska is opening up to her, so Rose opens up in turn.

She weeps.

She starts crying right there, in the doorway, and there is the old ingrained terror at letting go, of letting the mask shift even a fraction of an inch. But it's akin to jumping into a dark pit, if only to avoid the wolves stalking her along its lip; she has to vent this pressure somehow, or she'll be destroyed from within. The relief is enormous.

Vriska embraces her.

*

Rose is used to pushing acquaintances away when they verge on becoming friendships, because friends are loose cannons. They are beyond her control, she tells herself, and she doesn't want anything that's beyond her control in her life.

Except, this time, maybe she does.

She actually manages to calm down after a while, despite the absurd stray thought that crosses her mind in the midst of her weeping, as clearly as if she'd spoken it aloud: _now that I've started, I'm never going to be able to stop._ But she does, and eventually she just sits snuffling on Vriska's bed, feeling empty and cleansed with her roommate's arms slung around her.

After that, they start talking. Slowly, carefully at first; Vriska speaks very gently, as if Rose were built of cards and anything above a murmur might make her collapse. So she makes a few wry jokes, just to let her roommate know that she is back, she is back in control.

The conversation flows easier, then, and soon she is actually feeling cheered up. Not just holding on, but genuinely cheered up. She wonders if anyone she'd decided to open up to might've succeeded with that, or if the feat is Vriska-specific.

Before she knows it, Vriska is talking about her past. About the town where she grew up, about her loathsome mother; about the car accident where her car caught fire, resulting in the loss of her eye and arm. About the consequences: her disability pension which hopefully means that she'll never have to work again, but also having her driver's license revoked due to the sight loss.

"It's not a problem to me," she says, and indicates her prosthetic arm, her eyepatch. "Not this. But sometimes I really, _really_ miss driving, you know?"

And Rose tells her own story, even though she feels a sense of secret shame that she leaves so much out. All the things she was actually crying about – her nightmares, her brother's descent into darkness, Terezi Pyrope's shark-like grin on her own driver's license – are things she can never tell anyone about. She doesn't want to lie to Vriska now that she is being shown this unexpected kindness, but she has no choice.

Afterwards they watch some movie or other, half-lying uncomfortably across the bed with Vriska's laptop propped up on a chair by their feet. Rose knows her neck is going to be stiff in the morning, but that's a consequence she's willing to take, because Vriska is wrapped around her like so many creeping vines, asleep, and when she sleeps all the guile really disappears from her face.

When Rose finally extracts herself from Vriska's embrace, she folds the laptop shut, but not before she's admired the sleeping girl by the ghostly glow of the screen. She follows the contour of a pronounced jaw, the soft swell of halfway parted lips. She thinks she can even see the miniscule movements of Vriska's dreaming eyes beneath her eyelids, but maybe that's just her imagination.

Rose shuts the door to Vriska's room gently behind her. She has a pretty good idea that tonight's rest is going to be untroubled, but before she sleeps, she takes a midnight walk and disposes of a certain wallet.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"Slide on over here, let me give you a squeeze_  
>  _To avert this unholy evolutionary trajectory_  
>  _Can you hear what I hear, babe?_  
>  _Does it make you feel afraid?"_  
>  \- Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, _Abattoir Blues_

Two police officers come to the apartment the next day. They introduce themselves as officers Captor and Makara, and say they want to talk to her about the murder of one Jade Harley. At first she can't understand how they even know she's here – Dave certainly never would have divulged that information deliberately, and she knows he's too smart to do it by accident – but then she understands. Karkat must've mentioned her.

And her arrival coincides rather neatly with Jade's disappearance.

Shit.

Her face betrays nothing of this, and she invites them in politely, offers them a seat at the kitchen table and a cup of coffee. They sit down but decline the offer for a cup. Captor, the one doing the talking, is scrawny, but the tendons moving under the pale skin of his arms suggest that he can summon more than enough strength in situations where it's needed. His partner, Makara, who is in bad need of a shave and in all honesty looks more like he'd be on the receiving end of an arrest, keeps quiet.

Captor – who has fearsome sideburns, she notes, and such a very fitting name for an officer of the law – says, "Miss Lalonde, we were hoping to talk to you about Jade Harley."

She nods. She knows.

"Miss Harley was found dead the day before yesterday, in a dumpster downtown. The cause of death was pretty clearly murder. We understand Miss Harley was romantically involved with your brother."

"Yes." Her mouth feels dry but her voice comes out steady, sounding completely normal. She can't stop herself from adding: "'Was' being the operative word here."

Captor grunts noncommittally at that. "Were you two close?"

"Jade and I? We hardly knew each other."

"Did you ever meet her?"

"Twice. Briefly. Most recently – well, the last time I met her, it seems... was three months ago." The way to lend credence to a lie is to package it with a generous amount of truth. Except for the fact that she knows exactly to whose hand Jade succumbed, Rose intends to play the role of the model law-abiding citizen helping the officers with their inquiries.

They ask her a few more questions, mostly about Dave and Jade's relationship, and Rose's relationship to her brother. She intuits, correctly, that this is all just leading up to the real point of interest.

Finally, sounding almost casual, Officer Captor asks her how long she's been in town, and she tells him just over a week. If they want confirmation on that, they can talk to her roommate, who sublets the room where she's staying. Captor asks her why she moved. She tells him she's been having some financial difficulties lately, and her far more economically stable brother promised her some help until the time came when she could pay him back.

Again, a healthy dose of truth: the financial difficulties are certainly no lie, even if they're not the true reason. It's not her most finely crafted lie – why would she lean on her brother now, of all times, with his girlfriend missing? – but she meets Officer Captor's inscrutable gaze head-on, and he breaks first and that's that, she hopes.

They stay for too long after that, asking further inane questions and saying obvious things like "If you recall any more information, give us a call." She tells them politely that she'll keep that in mind.

*

She has to see Dave. They have to talk about this, they have to work it out, they have to do _something._ But before she makes it out the door, Vriska calls her name and grabs her arm.

Rose whirls around, and Vriska raises her hand in a conciliatory gesture. "Whoa, hey. Calm down."

"I am calm," Rose responds, though her voice comes out unfortunately brittle. "But I'm in a hurry."

"Look, I just wanted to say... Well, I'm sorry, alright? For... saying stuff about your brother. I didn't know." And this is so hard for her, Rose can recognize in her face that familiar unwillingness to let go, to open up, and God, how could she ever miss that they're so alike?

She says it's alright.

*

The police have talked to Dave too, obviously. And Karkat as well, Dave tells her. He's sprawled across the couch, though it's a two-seater so his long legs hang over the armrest, and he looks for all the world as relaxed as he always does. Rose is his counterpoint, standing stiffly in the doorway with her arms crossed.

"This is a serious issue," she says. "We need to talk things through."

"What's there to talk about?" he drawls, looking up into the ceiling, and she finds herself wishing that he'd take those damn shades off so she could tell if he was actually listening to her.

"For example, the fact that my arrival here coincides pretty neatly with Jade's disappearance. Suspicion could very easily fall on me, Dave. And while I had nothing to do with Jade, they could certainly connect me to Terezi."

And still that infuriating calm. "Man, you're on a first-name basis with that chick now? Chill out, babe. We did everything the way you said."

"I hope you realize that might not be enough." And she can't keep the quaver from her voice, not entirely – what's happening? Is she losing control? – and her hands ball into fists almost instinctively. "There's no such thing as the perfect crime, Dave."

And there, for just a fraction of a second but obvious like a flashing neon sign to her nonetheless, a ripple moves across his face and it shows how frightened he is, too. She's seen that expression on his face before. Years before, in fact – lit faintly by their father's flashlight, and faced with the twitching, slightly _wrong_ husk of their father's body. (In a moment of association, she also recalls her mother slurring"Rosie, hun, I'm not in the _ffffuckin'_ mood.")

The difference between her and her brother, she knows, is that she's worn a mask all her life, a shell, she's built walls about herself. Meanwhile, he's blanketed the fear and pain in layers of ironic apathy for so long that the apathy has become sincere.

He did say that she was always the stronger one.

This is what he chooses to say next, in his fear: "I need to do it again."

 _It._ He sounds like a drug addict talking about his next high, and maybe it is a kind of high. He certainly seemed to derive a certain pleasure from it with Terezi. She steps forward, into the living room, and as she does she realizes with a sudden jolt that she is very, very afraid of him; but when she speaks she speaks in the same stern voice she always used to keep him in check when they were children, even though she's the younger one.

"You can't. Not now." And, trying to placate him: "Not until we're past this crisis."

For a long moment, he only looks at her, and she has to suppress a shiver. Then he repeats himself, obtusely. "I need it."

She lifts her chin and thinks of puppets, and the darkness she knows they share, and her boundless, heartbreaking love for him. She wonders if she's already failed at protecting him. "Then you'll do it without my help."

He calls her name after her, like an invective, as she leaves.

*

Rose is in a dark place, but she's not afraid, not at first. She is with her brother, after all, and Dave is warm and close and she clings to him and she feels safe. The darkness isn't frightening, it's warm and snug. She nestles her face in the crook of his shoulder and smells his smell.

Only there's a sudden light that flickers below, and a good-natured voice that calls for them. It doesn't use their names. It calls them _little man_ and _little lady_ , and Rose is suddenly ice cold. She manages to push Dave away even though the terror conspires to turn her immobile.

She knows why her mother drinks, in that moment – some days Rose manages to convince herself that it's not a problem, or that it has been a problem but is going to get better from here on out. Mostly she knows her mother is sick, which is true, but it's not the whole truth. Tonight, as the dark of the hayloft is disturbed by her father's flashlight below, she knows the real reason why her mother drinks.

It's because Roxy doesn't want to see the true face of the man she married.

And of course they're going to be found, of course he knows they're up there, where else would they be? But when he finally does come up, he doesn't climb the ladder, he _skitters_ up it in the span of a second, and holy God, he moves like a _puppet_ and he says: "Little man, little lady, don't you know that's _weird?_ "

This time, Rose wakes up when the door to her room slams into the wall, and for a second she is petrified and fully expecting to see a jerking puppet-shape silhouetted against the dim hallway light, but it's only Vriska.

On cue, the voice in her head commands her to _stop crying CONTROL YOURSELF,_ but her skin is crawling and she's so afraid and everything is going wrong so what she does instead is extend her hand to Vriska, who has stopped uncertainly at the foot of the bed, and who steps forward and takes it and sinks down on the floor next to her and Rose doesn't know if she's ever been more grateful for anything to anyone.

Vriska says: "Wow, Lalonde, you're really fucking up my beauty sleep."

"I'm so sorry," Rose hiccups, her voice thick with tears, "you really are in desperate need of it." And then she nestles her free hand in her roommate's tangled hair and pulls her close and kisses her. Because: her insufferable, emotionally stunted roommate with the missing eye and the plastic arm _still_ manages to be the closest thing Rose has to normalcy and safety right now, which is really a testament to how fucked up her existence is.

But also because: Vriska is warm and her lips are soft, and Rose is glad she didn't push this one away.

Vriska breaks the kiss after only a couple seconds, shocked, and murmurs, "Jesus, Rose, are you sure?" And Rose hums in response, nods, pulls her close again, and this time Vriska leans into the kiss.

*

Soon enough, Vriska is straddling Rose's stomach. Their lips lock again, and that is good, but when the kiss breaks it's even better, because Vriska straightens up and Rose can freely admire her beauty – her slightly boyish frame, the imperious set of her jaw, her broken silhouette where an arm is missing. In that moment, that imperfection is somehow very beautiful.

Rose puts her hand on Vriska's hips, slips them under the hem of her t-shirt, starts to pull it off. Vriska gently grabs her wrist, and mumbles again: "Are you sure?" And even though her eyes are still swimming with tears, Rose nods: she's sure, she's sure, she's sure.

So Vriska peels her shirt off one-handed (with practiced ease), and Rose's hands run almost reverently over the unfamiliar smooth topography, the brave new world of this strange, wonderful girl's body.

Vriska's nipples are surprisingly dark against her skin, and Rose leans up to take one of them in her mouth, but not before she's planted a kiss on that weirdly charming stump. That makes Vriska chuckle, low in her throat, and in the small hours of the night they become lovers, the two of them.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"Meanwhile inside me, it was raining stones_  
>  _You didn't know_  
>  _God bless your soul."_  
>  \- Norah Jones, _Light As A Feather_

It's already noon when they're woken from their tangled sleep by _Caprice No. 24 in A minor_ (Paganini), accompanied by a strident buzzing – Rose's phone. She extracts herself from Vriska's clingy embrace for the second time these past few days and goes to answer it.

It's Dave. "I'm comin' over."

She opens her mouth to reply, but he's already hung up on her. Locking the phone again, she turns back to the bed, where Vriska is lazing languidly, stretching like a cat, the covers slipping down to reveal her naked breasts. "Your brother?"

Rose kneels beside her, mirroring the scene from that night. But instead of kissing her again, she says to Vriska: "He's coming over. Do you think you could stay in your room while he's here? He's not well."

Vriska rolls over on her side, and Rose reflects briefly on how odd and oddly charming it is that she has no arm there that gets in the way. "Well, no shit he's not well, considering what happened."

Rose takes her hand and smiles gratefully and – oh, but this is the strange part – genuinely. She finds herself wishing again that she could be candid, but there are so many things she can't talk about: she can't explain about the darkness she's afraid is rising in Dave, nor can she explain how their abusive father might not have been exactly human (and again, the memory of her mother's voice: _I'm not in the ffffuckin' mood,_ but she certainly was in the fucking mood later on, wasn't she?)...

Nor can she explain about the night on the hayloft, when the youngest two siblings Lalonde ran away from home out of fear of their father's increasingly erratic behavior, and because they were confused and because they were teenagers they ended up taking comfort in one another's bodies... And oh, even though it made her happy, she knows even without being called "little lady" that that's _weird._

_(And of course they haven't even hugged since that night and Dave wouldn't even let her sleep under the same roof as him.)_

*

Dave looks terrible. He's actually scratching at his arms, like a junkie, and his lip twitches in time to some irregular psychological rhythm. And – yes – it's not just her fraying, frightened mind, some of his movement are subtly wrong, weirdly artificial somehow.

Oh, this is bad.

He says to her even before she's closed the door behind him, "Rose, you gotta help me. The cops showed up at my place, they... wanna take me in for questioning. I think they know."

She'd guide him into the kitchen – but she doesn't want him in the apartment because she's afraid of him, even though she doesn't show it; nothing short of terrified. They stay in the hall. "How did you get here?"

"I... drove. I drove. I was in my car when they came, I was down the block."

What's wrong with this picture is chillingly obvious. "How did you _know_ to leave the house?"

"I just... knew." He's still scratching at his arms in that jerky way, and his lip goes twitch twitch twitch, and she's wondering what he's not telling her, if anything. Did some premonition beyond mere paranoia chase him from his home before the police came for him?

And then he grabs her, suddenly burning with feverish intensity. "I... gotta do it again. Gotta..." He trails off, then tries again. His fingers dig into her arm. "Just one more..." And she struggles, because his fingers are digging painfully into her arm and oh, this is very bad.

He's getting agitated, forceful, he raises his voice and says "You're _going_ to help me again," and she says his name just as loud, and that's when Vriska, wearing an expression of concern, opens the door to her room: right in Dave's line of vision, a beautiful young woman, fitting his modus operandi perfectly.

The change is instantaneous.

He marionettes his way past Rose, limbs moving unnaturally, shoving her to one side and _God_ he's fast, but she manages to get a grip on the back of his shirt and she _heaves_ , and he goes tumbling backwards and smacks against the doorjamb. That's when his shades slip off and fall off his face, and she sees his eyes and all the self-control in the world couldn't stop this scream, because his eyes are bulging and empty and dead. Glass eyes.

Oh, mommy, this is so very bad.

*

She's seen eyes like that on a person before. On her father, to be precise – Calvin Lalonde, known as Lil Cal by his friends – on a day that began with her mother well and truly smashed and cawing at her that _Rosie, hun, I'm not in the ffffuckin' mood_ when Rose tried to broach the subject of her father's possible deteriorating mental health.

Even back then she was somewhat of an armchair psychologist, and there was definitely something wrong with her father, something which she identified then as mental illness and ever since that night as some darkness that went far deeper than any chemical imbalance in the brain. Whatever it was, it was getting progressively worse. Rose saw it, Dave saw it, the only one who didn't want to see it was their mother who was not in the _ffffuckin'_ mood.

So she and Dave ran away. They ran because their father had taken to leering at them, and his old nicknames of "little man" and "little lady" had begun to take on strange, unwelcome harmonics, and his movements were slightly, uncannily wrong. They climbed out a window and fled to where the fields began, and when it got too dark to see, they hid in the hayloft of a barn to sleep.

And there, because their father was crazy and their mother was a drunk and they had no-one but each other, they slept with each other. And even though Rose knew it was wrong, intellectually, it was a comfort to her when she most needed to be comforted.

Then came the sudden voice from below, the searching beam of the flashlight. The voice called: "Little man, are you there? Little lady, where are you hiding?" And of course their father made a show of carefully searching the barn, letting them wait, letting them _fear_ before he came up the ladder too fast, his eyes big and startlingly blue and startlingly dead.

And he inclined his head and took one look at their naked bodies and intimated, as if he were sharing a juicy secret: "Little man, little lady, don't you know that's _weird?_ "

And of course he was stronger than the both of them, and of course they were frozen with fear and he was animated with true, deep madness, and that might've been the end of them if their mother hadn't chosen that moment to come clumsily up the hayloft ladder, brandishing the big kitchen knife. But she was still drunk, and her desperate display of courage ended with her husband spinning around and smacking her across the face with the back of his hand. She fell off the hayloft, collapsing on the plank floor below, and the knife went soaring out of her grip.

That was when Rose finally regained enough control of herself to scream – a true banshee wail, an ululating animal sound of distress. That alerted the property owner, who soon came out of the house in nothing but underwear and a t-shirt and holding a big, agitated dog on a straining leash. He came through the door and was dumbfounded by the scene that greeted him – the Lalonde children naked on the hayloft, their father standing over them with his unnatural eyes staring, Mrs Lalonde unconscious on the barn floor with her nose bleeding in profusion.

Now Lil Cal Lalonde came at the farmer instead, leaping down from the hayloft with limbs puppeting, and the farmer froze stock-still while the dog cowered and whined, all the fight gone out of it. Things might have ended very differently than they did if Rose hadn't sprung into action in that moment too, running on pure adrenaline, almost tumbling down the ladder in her urgency to get down and swiping the big kitchen knife off the rough plank floor.

Her father was just a couple of feet away from the petrified farmer when the blade slipped between his ribs. It stopped him in his tracks, and a shudder went through him. He half-turned, his arm reaching awkwardly back as if he were trying to reach a troublesome itch. Rose extracted the knife and stabbed him again, and again, some of the blows striking true, some scraping against his bones in a way that would've set her teeth on edge if she'd had the attention to spare.

Even when he sank to the floor, all the alien limberness gone from his carcass, she kept stabbing, teeth bared, hearing nothing but her own blood panic-rushing in her ears. She knew with all her being that he was going to rise again if she stopped, fix her with that dead stare and call her "little lady," voice weak thanks to his ruined lungs.

But when the farmer finally pulled her off him and the knife fell from her nerveless fingers, Lil Cal Lalonde, victim to madness and vessel of some great darkness, stayed down.

_(You always were the stronger one.)_

As described in the police report, the official chain of events for that night went as follows: Calvin Lalonde, gone crazy, abducted his children David and Rose and, in a fit of irrationality, took them to the nearby barn in order to molest them (they were, after all, naked; this was the farm's owner's deduction, and none of the surviving Lalondes saw any reason to disabuse him of this notion). However, the children's mother as well as the property owner intervened at this point; an altercation followed; in the end Rose grabbed the knife and stabbed her father multiple times in the back, resulting in his death.

The way to lend credence to a lie, of course, is to package it with a generous amount of truth.

Under the circumstances, Rose's actions were seen as being in self-defense.

*

All this flashes by with the reptile speed of memory – a fraction of a second to recall every single horrible detail of the night she's spent her life trying to deny. There's no use denying it now. Dave is living, walking proof of it.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"Goodbye, blue sky_  
>  _Goodbye, blue sky, goodbye."_  
>  \- Pink Floyd, _Goodbye Blue Sky_

Rose turns to Vriska and yells: "Run!"

Vriska, bless her, is smart enough to know that this is no time to question either what she sees or Rose's judgment; she takes off deeper into the apartment, towards the window with the fire escape. Rose turns to follow, but Dave – or whatever it is that's now inhabiting his body – catches her hair and stops her, yelping, in her tracks.

She struggles and claws at his hands, but his grip is iron, and her flailing kicks miss their marks. That is when Vriska comes back, charging down the hall like a vengeful comet with a kitchen chair for a tail. The hall is too small and the angle is awkward and she only has one good hand to grip the backrest with, anyway, but there's enough desperate strength in her swing that it does the trick.

Though it doesn't daze the Dave-thing as long as it rightly should, it makes him tumble against the wall and lose his grip long enough for Rose to stagger forward, and she and Vriska run for the fire escape. The window is already open and they clamber out, but Dave is right behind them and Rose fears that ladders won't pose a challenge to him in the state he's in.

But Vriska, bless her once more, reaches past Rose and grabs the window and slams it down on puppet-Dave's reaching hands, which buys them a few seconds, and Rose is already climbing as fast as she can, and at least they're only on the third floor.

She jumps down the last flight, losing her balance as she lands and scraping her knees on the rough asphalt of the alleyway. She's halfway on her feet again when Dave catches up with Vriska, and the two of them go tumbling down the ladder to land in a painful sprawl at the bottom.

Rose runs over, but the second she reaches them Dave stands up and all but shrugs her off so she goes flying again, this time scraping her ass up consummately.

Vriska groans, because the undesirability of falling down a ladder is only exacerbated when you only have one good hand to catch yourself with. But when the Dave-thing grabs her left wrist and _pulls,_ she does something that fills Rose with such sudden admiration that she lets out a breathless, desperate laugh: Vriska shoves her right hand into the neckline of her t-shirt and reaches across her body to perform a few practiced, unseen actions in the area of her left shoulder, and her prosthesis comes off and Dave goes tumbling backwards with a handful of disembodied plastic arm.

Rose has reached her fallen lover again at this point. She claps her hand on Vriska's remaining wrist and pulls her up off the hard ground. But then puppet-Dave is already coming at them again, glass eyes staring, wearing a joker rictus grin and brandishing Vriska's prosthetic arm like a club.

"Run," Rose shouts for the second time. They need to get somewhere a little more populated, but Dave is blocking their route out onto the street, so they take off down the grubby alley. But he's inhumanly fast, and the two of them only manage to get so far before he's caught up with them. He catches Vriska across the shoulder with her prosthesis with uncanny strength, so she goes tumbling against the brick wall with a yell, and then he twines his fingers in Rose's hair again and yanks so hard she loses her balance.

Unlike their leering father, he hasn't said a word since he – changed. Rose doesn't know if this is better or worse.

The next minute is a blur of horror and bruising blows as they wrestle ungracefully, and it strikes Rose's writer's heart, suddenly and absurdly, that this is so undignified a final showdown.

When Vriska manages to wrest the prosthesis from Dave's claw-like grip again, she wastes no time and begins beating him savagely. He turns to her but that's when Rose leaps onto his back from behind and clings and throws him off-balance while Vriska works him over.

Soon enough she's thrown off, though, and she goes stumbling back against the wall hard, and the breath is knocked from her. And though Vriska is striking again and again, with desperate fervor, it's Rose that Dave turns to, looming over her and still _smiling_ as she doubles over and chokes.

It's not a difficult deduction. Put together, they are difficult; focus on one at a time and he'll make short work of them. Rose sees this outcome like she sees his lily-white hands rising, thumbs hooked and ready to take her eyes out.

That's when Vriska drops the arm and bends down, grabs the dead-eyed Dave-thing's ankle and _yanks,_ and he goes toppling over Rose and she cries out and shields herself with her arms. Vriska is manhandling Dave now, as well as she can manage with one hand, grasping the neckline of his shirt and pulling him off Rose, and Rose grabs the discarded prosthesis as Vriska yells: "Choke him!"

Fast as he is, he doesn't have time to turn around before she's on him again, this time lodging the fake limb under his chin and pulling tight. The second she does, she realizes with sudden horrified clarity that she really has no idea whether it will work or not. What if she crushes his windpipe and he still comes at her with those protuberant eyes and that ghoulish grin?

But of course she has no choice but to hold on, so she clings to him with a determination born of primitive terror while Vriska strikes and kicks him, and yes, as the seconds pass in slow motion his marionette movements actually do get a little more sluggish. And finally, as she _wrenches_ with a burst of strength she didn't know was in her, she hears a sickly _crunch_ and Dave sags.

She goes down with him, and when she does she hears him make his first noise since he stood in the apartment doorway. It's a single, sad little moan from a ruined throat; just a moan and nothing more.

*

Rose kneels by him, afterwards. She's aware of Vriska hovering nervous and silent behind her. Some part of her thinks: _if this were a story, this is where he would crack an eye open and bid me a dramaturgically satisfying farewell._ But he doesn't – and besides, his eyes are already open, though there's no hint of that uncanny glass stare. Whatever darkness it was that possessed him has left him now.

*

After an indeterminate amount of time, she hears sirens in the distance.

She puts a hand on Dave's cooling shoulder and squeezes – a gesture of forgiveness as much as a final goodbye. Then, she rummages through his pockets until she finds his car keys.

She stands up and grabs Vriska by her arm, pulling her along. Vriska still can't seem to tear her eyes off of Dave's tangled corpse, and as she staggers along for a few steps guided by Rose's grip, she says: "What just happened?"

"I'm going to tell you all about it," Rose responds grimly. "Once we've put some distance between ourselves and this sordid scene."

After a moment, Vriska snaps out of it – she blinks and shakes her head sharply once, and then follows Rose at a far more desirable speed. Once again, Rose feels some admiration and recognizes her newfound lover as a kindred spirit, a girl capable of her own brand of razor-sharp focus.

They make their way to Dave's car, and Rose tosses the car keys at Vriska and says, "Drive."

Vriska blanches as she catches them, but a tiny smile plays on her lips. "Me? Fuck, Lalonde, I'm half blind and I only got one arm. And that's not even considering the possible legal hassles stemming from the fact that I got no license anymore."

But the sirens are getting closer, and Rose has already slipped into the passenger side seat, and she reaches across the interior and opens the driver's side door from the inside. "I think that when it comes to legal hassles we're pretty well set already. Plus, at least you've driven before."

That's all the convincing necessary, apparently, and Vriska slips behind the wheel and sticks the key in the ignition. The engine comes alive with a growl, and Rose thinks Vriska handles herself admirably as she pilots the vehicle out into the afternoon traffic.

*

After some time, the silence is broken: "Okay, spill. What the hell did I just see?"

"Family troubles," Rose says, wishing she could leave it at that even as another, deeper part of her aches to tell the truth. Just when Vriska is about to speak again, she continues. "When I said my father was abusive... that wasn't the entire truth."

"Families suck. Though I got a feeling your family might've sucked more than most."

Rose leans her temple against the cool passenger side window and sighs. "I think you might've just witnessed the hereditary apotheosis of my dark bloodline."

Vriska doesn't take her eyes of the road when she says: "I didn't know half of those words, Lalonde."

Rose can't help but smile, and she looks over at her roommate turned friend turned lover turned partner in crime. "It means crazy runs in the family."

Vriska barks laughter, that harsh sound that's as far from beautiful as can be, but so curiously endearing all the same, and she looks feral with her wild mane of hair. "Yeah, no shit. Could've told you that from the second we met."

Instead of replying, Rose leans over and plants a tender kiss at the base of Vriska's smooth neck. Vriska's response is to smile coolly and let go of the wheel to fiddle with the radio, long enough that Rose gets a little antsy. But the radio starts and Vriska returns to steering before they crash; strains of music fill the car. The singer sounds like he should really consider doing anything but singing. Rose, who has experience in doing things she shouldn't, lets him sing.

_"Every step of the way, we walk the line / Your days are numbered – so are mine."_

And Rose settles back in her seat and experiences a feeling like a kick in the stomach, except it's slow and makes her want to weep instead of double over. "You realize we're completely doomed, don't you?"

Vriska starts counting off, not without a certain kind of dark relish. "Corpse in the alleyway right next to our fire escape, my arm right next to it, us fleeing in the victim's car... Yeah, babydoll, best case scenario they put us in the chair and get it over with quickly. Worst case we rot."

"I'm so sorry for dragging you into this."

Now Vriska lets go of the wheel again, but it's to grab Rose by the hand this time and pull her close and kiss her. Rose squeezes her eyes shut because she doesn't want to ruin this with tears, not now, and the kiss is positively _healing_ and she realizes she isn't afraid – not of the fact that Vriska isn't keeping an eye on the road. Because: they could crash, but so what? So what? If they don't, they're going to be caught tonight or tomorrow anyway; she gives them a week at the very outside.

At this point, a quick end would be more than she could ask for, and if she has to end then let this kiss be the exclamation point.

But they don't crash, and eventually the kiss ends and Vriska hauls the wheel until they're back on course, and the radio sings: _"All my powers of expression, and thoughts so sublime / Could never do you justice, in reason or rhyme."_

And Rose is overwhelmed with pure insensible _feeling,_ and her voice is small when she says to Vriska that she loves her.

Vriska grins like a demented shark as she leaves the sirens and the city behind, and she eyes the unfolding road like a bird of prey scanning its hunting grounds, and she says: "Love you too, kid. _Damn,_ it feels good to drive again."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay_  
>  _You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way."_  
>  \- Bob Dylan, _Mississippi_


End file.
